The problem with 100 MPW

The key to enlightenment in running is the acceptance that no one cares about your running.

Yeah I don’t know why everyone just doesn’t set their PRs at 20 MPW.

Way easier and you save a bunch of time to do other things.

I set my 5k PR of 14:34 at age 32 on 35-40 MPW. My college PR was 14:55 on 85MPW.

Interesting. Why do you think that is? What did you do differently in training?

This, but unironically.

You mean you know 100mpw to get a pb and therefore you are quicker so for the same time you run 98mpw…

People always get obsessed with that miles per week measure.
Remember that is just the distance you ran in that week. On it's own it doesn't indicate how fit you are.

If you think you would have set your PR at 32 with 14 years of 35-40 MPW you're delusional, sorry.

But I did set my PR at 32 on 35-40 MPW. It was about 6 or 7 years though, not 14. I didn't really run for a few years after college.

I eliminated the long run amd doubles. I was running 6 days per week with one day of cross training. I did a progressive run and one day of mile repeats per week. Those 2 days were about 8 miles each. I ran easy 5-6 milers the other 4 days.

this very well might be the greatest post of all time

Very interesting. You should make time to create a thread detailing your success because many would benefit from it. I would imagine you had a lot of mental changes to your running and life in general as well.

Sometimes if you want to PR again you might need to run even more than 100 a week and yes, there can be a bit of tedium involved. The question is whether getting another PR matters enough to you to endure the tedium.

Less sleep in college living with 3 other guys. Not much else other than just wanting to cut a few seconds off every year.

when you were in college carbon spring shoes didnt exist.... unless you did your PR with out them

I know I ran much stronger at 90-100 mpw than at 70.

100 miles a week isn't a magic number, running a lot and doing it consistently is what matters. Everyone will be different in what their max amount of miles they should do. Some should max at 40 miles a week and others at 120+ miles per week. And each training cycle you don't need to return to your highest mileage week.

Here's a great read about Bakken's ideas on mileage with a summarizing quote

"LL: What's a bit exciting is to talk a bit about what you came up with. What you think is best now, because you've probably thought different things along the way. You have a medical background and many professional aspects of this.
I thought we should go through some aspects of training and what you think is good. We can start with volume. What does it mean, and what thoughts do you have about how much should actually be trained and run?
MB: You're clearly dependent on running a lot of volume. What's interesting is whether it's… Whether it's partly a question of how much volume during a running career up to a certain point.
Because what I saw at the end of my career, that I could get away with fewer kilometers and be in correspondingly the same shape. And I think it has to do with running economy, and especially stabilizing ligaments and tendon structures and building up elasticity in the musculature, it's about a property that you train up, and then you won't need as much later in the career.
You see the same with the Kenyans, who have run a lot, and some of them eventually have lower kilometer numbers than many Western runners. But I think that weekly volume is important. It's difficult to run at least anything much under 160 km [100 mi] to become a good long-distance runner. Somewhere between 160 and 220 km [100–137 mi] is closer. But probably you can have parts of the year lie lower when you become more established. I think, then."

Located in the "Mileage: how much is necessary?" section

runningwritings.com

Marius Bakken in his own words: double threshold, lactate testing, altitude, periodization, and more

John Davis

Open link

I absolutely agree with that. At the very end of my best years I was doing less than I'd done for maybe the previous six years and managed a few small PBs and a decent marathon improvement.

I got into this once with Peter Snell. Without getting into all the physiological details the main thing mileage does is improve your heart's ability to deliver blood. Peter told me that once you've developed that capacity it never goes away unless you become "almost totally sedentary." He was talking about decades and had test results backing his comment. You can maintain that cardiovascular fitness without doing really big miles once you've established it. What goes away quickly, he told me, is muscular fitness if you don't work to maintain it but you can do that with lesser miles than you'd previously done.